The Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction

"One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."

 - Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Hammer of God," from The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

Martin Edwards is a British crime writer and author of an upcoming book, The Golden Age of Murder (2015), discussing the London Detection Club and examining "the mystery of the writers who invented the modern detective story."

Do You Write Under Your Own Name is Edwards' personal blog, represented here on the blog-roll of Insightful Informants, and two interesting posts appeared on there recently – concerning a resurgent interest in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The first post, "And the latest runaway bestseller is," considers the unexpected success harvest by the British Library Crime Classics with the republication of Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (1937) by J.J. Farjeon. We'll leave it to the scholars to debate who was more obscure, the book or its author, but the reprint of this long-forgotten mystery novel sold over 60.000 copies! The second post, "Golden Age reflections," asks the opinion of the blog-readers of why a rival of the classic crime novel is happening now.

Well, I believe it's been happening, slowly but surely, for a while now and began when the internet offered a free and open market place to small, independent publishing houses. Rue Morgue Press, House of Stratus and Crippen & Landru began in the early 2000s with reintroducing then forgotten mystery writers such as Glyn Carr, Anthony Berkeley, Torrey Chanslor, Craig Rice, Joseph Commings, Kelley Roos and Freeman Wills Crofts. It steadily expanded the available material to readers of Golden Age fiction beyond the shelves of secondhand bookshops and rummage stores.

A notable success story of these reprints is Gladys Mitchell, whose output was largely forgotten and next to impossible to find. That was until the Rue Morgue Press began reprinting some of her work, such as Death at the Opera (1934) and When Last I Died (1941), while Crippen & Landru collected all of Mitchell's short stories under the title Sleuth's Alchemy: Cases of Mrs. Bradley and Others (2005). Minnow Press reproduced a handful of expensive, hardcover edition of some of the harder to find titles in the Mrs. Bradley series. That was a decade ago and since then multiple publishers, big and small, republished nearly every mystery novel the prolific Mitchell wrote in her lifetime – and most of them were expensive collector items only a decade ago!

60.000 copies sold! The ride never ends.

The secondhand book hawkers of the internet market place also did their part in putting little known, long out-of-print detective stories back in the hands of readers, which made collecting vintage mysteries look really easy. However, I'll grudgingly admit that the growing popularity of e-readers and a growing catalogue of public-domain titles may've drawn a serious crowd of new readers to our genre. The names in the public domain are monuments of the transitional period between Sherlock Holmes with his Rivals and the Golden Age: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), G.K. Chesterton (Father Brown), Maurice Leblanc (Arsène Lupin), Jacques Futrelle (The Thinking Machine) and R. Austin Freeman (Dr. John Thorndyke). To name just a few. And their books are free or offered in bundles for pennies on the dollars.

Now juxtapose all of that to the stale, rigidly state of the contemporary crime novels topping the "Crime Bestseller Lists" for the past 20-30 years. The crime novel with cover art besieging you to consider it proper literature, exploring the criminal nature of mankind in a series of mini-biographies of the characters, guaranteeing a book bound with more substance than its plot. What about the character-driven series of police procedurals with a troubled cop or the literary thrillers in the hardboiled vein with a jaded protagonist. It's the same old, same old, come-and go realism critics have been raving about for decades and chugging awards at for "Transcending the Genre," character exploration and prose that's probably "stone-cold" or "ultra-modern."

A personal favorite reprinted by RMP

I believe the entrenchment of the contemporary crime novel, together with its tropes and clichés, while pretending to be the only game in town, is what kept drawing a bigger audience of readers to the detective stories of yore – offering even a wider variety of crime stories than its modern counterpart. Whodunits, howdunits, locked room and impossible crime stories, thrillers of all stripes, rogue stories, forensic mysteries, suspense, gothic romances, socially aware detectives, comedy of manners, spy intrigues, "Had-I-But-Known," historical mysteries, parodies and pastiches, hardboiled, softboiled, adventure-hybrids, SciFi-hybrids, early police procedurals, juvenile mysteries, etc. I think the abundance of short stories produced during the Golden years are being appreciated all over again by modern readers, because you can easily read one or two stories on the train or bus to kill the time.

From a consumer's perspective, it's completely understandable why these stories have become interesting again. They offer the reader a genuine choice and a majority can be downloaded with a swipe of a finger on your e-reader, of which a significant portion is in the public domain – completely free-of-charge. How can those stale, dime-a-dozen "Literary Thrillers" and "Crime Novels" compete with that?

Personally, I hope this expanding interest in the classics is a response to the postmodern deconstructivism, which is at the root of the contemporary crime movement, because I believe we're leaving that period behind us. What's left to deconstruct? Even the major prizes are given out to writers only marginally associated with the genre. So why would readers put up with the same themes being crammed down theirs throats how the world can be a dark, violent and unfair place swamped in corruption and deceit. That message has been duly noted over the past 15 years.

Maybe that's really why readers are turning to books enthusiastically shouting, "c'mon, what are you waiting for? The game's afoot!," instead of the ones depressingly asking "what's the point." Times and attitudes have changed. The meme "born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the universe" won’t be an epitaph for the 21st century, but a challenge that was met. We'll colonize the hell out of the Moon and Mars like the descend of Imperial Europe on the New World! 

Bits and Pieces

"So, with that display of general incompetence, we reach the end of recorded history. All that remains to see is who has learned its lessons, and who's condemned to repeat their mistakes endlessly…" 

- Stephen Fry (QI)

It has become a pattern of expectation for this blog to promise a resurgence in activity, during a rambling post or stuck at the end of a review, only to be followed up by another prolonged radio silence. And, this being December, I would be foolish to renew that promise for this month, but I do foresee a hike in blog activity for the holiday season.

Cameo appearance by John Dickson Carr

Firstly, I'll be composing the annual list of best-and worst mystery novels read in 2014, however, they probably won't be as comprehensive as in previous years – 'cause it was a slow year. You know the excuses by now.

Secondly, Dutch crime-and detective writer extraordinaire, M.P.O. Books, published his latest entry in the District Heuvelrug series, Cruise Control (2014), which I want to have read and reviewed before Christmas rolls around. It's not an impossible crime story such as the previous one, Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013), but a hunt for a possible serial killer and I have spotted a map of the crime scene! Books has consistently written splendid crime fiction since his return, after a four year hiatus, with De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010) and De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011) remains a high note in the series – deserving of a wider audience nationally and internationally. So you can expect a review of Cruise Control before 2015.

I'm afraid reviews of newer works and recent publication will be dominating the blog for the next month or two. There are five or six volumes of Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) on the itinerary and want to knock at least two of the list before the New Year.

Meanwhile, translator and publisher John Pugmire, from Locked Room International, never took a break from ferrying impossible crime stories from across the globe to a very appreciative, English-speaking reading audience – like a true purveyor of spirits! And, yes, I have some serious catching up to do in 2015 with the Locked Room Int. publications. Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's The Body Snatchers Affair (2015) will be published in January and still have a few mysteries by Keigo Higashino and Louise Penny to go through.

And, no, I have not forgotten about Otto Penzler's 900-page juggernaut, The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014), which I don't find intimidating at all. It's what I have trained and prepared for all my life under the mentorship of John Dickson Carr's ghost. Hey, I got halfway through the unabridged, four-volumes of five hundred and odd pages each epic known as Journey to the West (c. 1592) by Wu Cheng'en. I use the boxed set now as a book end.

So, yeah, 2015 is basically going to be more of the same: enthusiastically babbling about locked room mysteries, reviewing the classics, traversing the trail of obscurity and looking down contemptuously at the contemporary school of crime novels and their champions. 

The reader has been warned.  

The Sealed Room: A Literal Stronghold

"The lofty ceiling is not high enough,

The walls contain no consummated breath;

And hanging there, the orison of time.

Ticks and ticks and ticks its way to death."

- Hospital Waiting Room (Sister Mary Vista, R.S.M.)

The marginalizing of the detective story has been a recurring subject of discussion and banter on the GADetection Group, which probably began (again) when a gritty, "ultra-modern" private-eye novel, Where the Dead Men Go (2013) by Liam Mcllvanney, with a jaded protagonist won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel.

We could literarily feel the foundation of the genre tremble and transcend beneath our feet as we read about the winner's prose-powered, page turning storytelling powers and the books uncanny ability to linger in the mind beyond the final page. It sounded exactly like the kind of bleak, dime-a-dozen, Serious Grime (sic) novels that have come and gone for decades, but critics and scholars have always been favorably disposed to them for "Transcending the Genre" with character-driven narratives – while ignoring such tripe as sound plots and props (i.e. locked rooms and dying messages).

The mystery-sphere's correspondent in France, Xavier Lechard, noted in this ongoing, scattered discussion that as far as the really important "mystery" awards are concerned, "not only traditional mysteries need no apply, but standard crime fiction don't either," favoring novels only marginally affiliated to the genre. 'Cause genre fiction, any type of genre fiction, can be fun-inducing and having fun is dangerously irresponsible – even if it's just from an armchair. Personally, I find it hilarious how the "Respectable Wing" of the genre are distancing themselves from the label "genre fiction" and enclosing themselves in their padded hugbox. I wouldn't have dragged the discussion on to the blog, but I happened to stumble across an old essay from decades ago, more or less, addressing this issue from the perspective of the much maligned locked room sub-genre. The author had written down, what I thought, better than I ever could. I'm a hack reviewer, you see.

"The Locked Room: An Ancient Device of the Story-Teller, but Not Dead Yet" by Donald A. Yates, Professor of Spanish-American Literature and book collector, was published in the 1956 autumn issue of The Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review and begins with outlining the critique leveled at literature in general at the time – which boiled down to the "classical concept of structure" and "form-for-the-sake-of-form." Obviously, the detective story (and the locked room prop) is guilty as judged, but, as Yates points out, it's a form of literature that actually thrives on those limitations. It has thrived and proven to be fertile grounds for creative writing for over a century, but has often, unsuccessfully, been declared dead and buried.

Yates' response to the critics, scholars and contemporary crime novelists eagerly signing their name on the death certificate of the detective story should be committed to memory, "I should like to show that even when its death papers are signed and delivered, a genre is capable of lively revolt" and "that it may throw these papers up in server's face and suddenly reveal that it has acquired a new life and new direction—merely through the stimulation of imagination lent to it by a new individual who has dedicated himself to a fresh treatment of its themes and traditions," because it has happened since this piece was written. Many times!

Herbert Resnicow brought four decades of experience in engineering and construction to the game in the 1980s, which is reflected in the unique way Resnicow approached the problem of the sealed room (e.g. The Gold Deadline, 1984 and The Dead Room, 1987). The neo-orthodox movement in Japan has pioneered, what could be called, "Corpse Puzzles," in which writers fool around with dismembered body parts to create identity problems, alibis and seemingly impossible crimes (e.g. Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). Just two examples.

It continues with a (spoiler laden!) historical overview of the locked room device, from Edgar Allan Poe, Melville Davisson Post and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Gaston Leroux, Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, which covers the middle portion of the essay, before, prophetically, speculating on its future. Yates states that "the limitations of the locked-room puzzle offer to such writers a challenge which is really rather difficult to resist" and "it seems that in hand of every new advance in the field of human knowledge there comes a new way to polish off someone inside that wonderfully appealing locked room." After all, "Poe had no vacuum cleaner, and we have no penetrating death-ray gun, but it might be next." Last year, M.P.O. Books published Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013), in which crime-scene hermitically locked, fortress-like villa guarded with cameras and motion-sensory detectors, but Books found a way for his murderer to by pass those security measures. And the penetrating death-ray gun... I remember a relatively obscure story (from the 2000s) that had the murderer ignite an incendiary device inside a locked apartment with the assistance of a simple laser pen.

I’ll be citing the last lines of the essay in full for prosperity sakes and to close this rambling post: "No, indeed, the last nail has not yet been driven into the restless coffin of the locked-room tale. On the contrary, its critics probably have had their obituaries interpreted more often as a challenge than as a public notice. So with this toast, I would like to hail the mystery authors of years yet to come who will be rallying to the call—Here's to the second hundred years!"

Hear, hear! And many thanks to Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller, William DeAndrea, Paul Halter, Louise Penny, M.P.O. Books, P.J. Bergman, Paul Doherty, Richard Forrest, Edward D. Hoch, Martin Méroy, Fredric Neuman, John Sladek, Japan and any other writer who picked up the challenge in the post-GAD era. I'll catch up to you sooner or later!

 

P.S.: I think the actual truth behind the locked room mystery's refusal to die lies in the soft, muffled thumping coming from the tell-tale heart hidden beneath its floorboards. What else did you expect Edgar Allan Poe put in there when he gave life to the detective story? We got a spare heart from the horror genre and now we're immortal! You can bury us. You can wall us up. You can declare us dead, but, like "The Black Cat," we'll always come back. Always!

Throwing Down the Gauntlet: An Insane Locked-Room Puzzle

"There's just something missing."

- Michael Ende (The Never-Ending Story, 1979)

In the on-going series, "Pretending to Post," I have constructed a locked room riddle based on an idea that sort-of popped-up in my head, but the insanity of the explanation probably makes it an insoluble problem. However, the dark annexes forming the crime-ridden corners of the blogosphere teem with inquisitive foxes that'll jump on any challenge. So I hope they have fun sinking their teeth in this one!

Bacherlorhood in Victorian times

The mise-en-scène is a well-attended costume party and two of the attendees, garbed as Jack the Ripper and Tarzan, retreat themselves into a windowless room and bolted the door behind them. On the opposite of the room door is a wide niche, where someone is sitting to take and hand back coats and bags to visitors, generally to keep an eye on things, and swears nobody entered or left the room for quite some time – until the door suddenly opened and a Voodoo priest appears!

This apparition waves around a staff with a skull on top of it and has rug sack-sized, animal skin-type bag slung over his over his other shoulder. There's a bone-fingered necklace hanging from his neck and strings with bones and glass bottles of dark potions clatter around his body. He does a ritual, slow motion dance through the hallway, into the filled-up party hall, and disappears in a crowd of partying monsters. The room is bare except for a roaring fire in the hearth and lifeless furniture. It's as if Jack and Tarzan never entered that room at all.

So what happened? The facts are that two men entered a windowless room and the chimney is too narrow to allow a grown man to climb through it and let the other guy light a fire, change costumes and burn the original one the fire - before leaving the room. If the room would be subjected to a forensic investigation, they would barely find any DNA or cremated remains in the hearth. Except for burned pieces of cloth. Two people entered that room, but only one of them, perhaps even an unknown person, walked out of that sealed and watched room.

But how? If you've a shimmer of an idea, it might be fun to post it before you read further.

SPOILER, highlight text or press CTRL+A to read: upon entering the room, Jack the Ripper stunned Tarzan with his Victorian-era walking stick and took a roll of plastic from his surgeon's kit and covered a piece of the floor. He draped his cloak on top of the plastic and rolled the unconscious Tarzan on top of it.

Yes, but...

SPOILER, (...): Jack the Ripper than proceeded to kill Tarzan and threw his own costume into the fire, after ripping off the buttons, and slipped on the Tarzan slip – after which he gutted and dismembered Tarzan. Remember, the surgical knives are part of the Ripper attire, albeit a personal customization on the murderer's part.  

That still doesn't explain how only one person walked out of windowless and guarded room without leaving any traces!

SPOILER, (...): Oh, ye of little faith! The murderer proceeded to make his macabre ornaments out of the body parts and reusing parts of his own costume. The staff with the skull was the Ripper's walking stick with Tarzan's skinned head on it, and well, you know what he did with the bones. The organs were put in the bottles that were in the kit and wrapped the other stuff up in (more) plastic and put in the kit or the animal-skin, plastic-lined bag that he wore under his cloak when he entered the room. When the body had disappeared and had adorned him with his slain victim, he wrapped up the blood-drenched cloak and plastic – stuffing it in the kit that went in the bag with the rest and that was slung over his shoulder. The murderer than put up his little act in the hallway and strutted into crowd, towards the backdoor and into history.

W-why? Why would anyone do that?! To be completely honest with you, that's kind of the weak point, which is why I threw it out here for the fun of it, but there's a way to properly motivate it in universe where people go through such insane lengths for a disappearing act.

SPOILER, (...): To pull it off in the first place, you've to be a skilled pathologist and so what if the man under the Ripper costume was a well-renowned pathologist with a skeleton or two in closet. Maybe he illegally sold body parts. Who knows. And Tarzan was a blackmailer, a low-level criminal who found out and made the connection, and fixed a rendezvous at the party and felt secure to meet him behind the locked door of that room when there was someone standing guard outside. Nobody knew of his side job or that somebody found out about it, and thus nobody knew he had solid motive for making this person thoroughly disappear. He might have had van park near by where he could chance and carefully remove the remains he's carrying. Safely home, he could practically put the skull on his desk without ever attracting attention.

No. The ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler does not possess me.

Just About as Strange as Fiction: Day to Day Miracles

"The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen."

- Father Brown

"Oh, that never happens in real life" or "lack of realism" are tired old platitudes that are wheeled out every so often to demonstrate the artificiality of the mystery genre and no other trope is more detached from our day-to-day life than the Locked Room Mystery. That is, if you ignore actual cases like the seemingly impossible murders of Isidore Fink and Laetitia Toureaux or coffins being swung around in sealed crypt on the island of Barbados, but in my wandering on the internet I found many examples of domestic miracles – showing that the locked room problem is a lot more common than most people think it's.

Example #1: The Problem of the Intoxicated Thespian

Lawson (left) in The Wrong Box (1966)

The blog Shadowplay has post dating from 2008 describing an anecdote involving actor and funnyman Wilfred Lawson, "one of the few actors who could function quite well with a skinful," and was locked into a dressing room before a radio interview – hoping it would prevent him from getting drunk. When they returned after an hour and opened the door, they found Lawson hammered and nobody knew how he got his hands on the demon rum. The comment section is rive with every solution imaginable and the one that immediately sprang to my mind was that he bribed someone on the outside to poke a straw through the keyhole, but that one was already offered. So to safe my reputation as the blogosphere's resident locked room enthusiast, I'll give one more solution to this problem.

Sometimes, actor's pick up a skill or a trick through their work, the cast of Leverage was trained in pick-pocketing, and I can imagine that a professional drunkard has few tricks up his sleeve. What if... Lawson was armed with a flask of hard liquor that he slipped into the pocket of the minder before going to the dressing room, shook his hand or gave him a pad on the shoulder at the door, so he wouldn't feel the other hand fishing the flask from his pocket, and spend the next hour getting drunk. Upon the return of the minder, Lawson slipped the flask back into the pocket of the minder and probably retrieved it after he and/or the room was searched.

Example #2: The Cat Who Created a Miracle

Jill McGown (1947-2007)

Jill McGown was a contemporary mystery writer of the inspector Lloyd and Judy Hill mysteries, who died in 2007 at the age of 59, and, from what I heard, her earlier work is very much in the Golden Age vein – and in the opinion of Douglas Greene she was one of the best. That got my attention and Google'd her name to find a homely tale on her website of her cat who made an attempt at outdoing Edgar Allan Poe at his own game. Here's the story in McGown's own words:

"I came in to find Greta polishing off Frankie's Go-Cat (she starts with the tinned food and moves on to the dry stuff). She shot past me, towards the front window, the way she had come in. The window has two large panes that open from the side, and a little one between these two that opens from the bottom. It's on a cantilevered hinge, so when you open it, there is a space above and below it. Greta jumped, landed on top of it (on the side of the glass that is outside when the window's closed), squeezed through the gap, and took off, kicking it with her back feet as she launched herself into the air, which action neatly closed the window behind her. If I had come down a moment later, I would have found the house catless, the cat food gone, and the windows all securely shut. Edgar Allen Poe couldn't have done it better."

I applaud McCavity Greta for creating this ingenious little locked room that could've been easily incorporated into a story: a straight forward murder case becomes a bone-fide impossible crime, because the victim's cat accidentally closed the killer's exit. You can find McGown's original post here.

Example #3: You're Gonna Carry That Weight

To be completely honest, I have no way of confirming the veracity of the next story that has been floating on the internet and apparently came from a book of unsolved mysteries – entitled Mysteries of the Unexplained (1992?). Anyhow, the problem that baffled the police involves the Dowing Construction Company of Indianapolis and a five ton steel wrecking ball hanging from a crane 200 feet above the ground that vanished overnight in 1974.

My initial theory was that the ball was lowered into a hole in the ground and buried. Motive? Sabotage. Practical joke. Payback from employees on the boss. You name it. But the best solution came from "Samskara," at the JDCarr forum, who proposed this gem of an explanation:

"Alternately, another crew on a job elsewhere in town might have found that their 1 ton wrecking ball simply wasn't up to the job. They came over with a suitable truck, lowered the 5 ton ball into the back of the truck, drove back to their own site, and switched the wrecking balls. This would reduce the amount of time and activity at the site from which the ball disappeared, and the missing ball would be rather like the purloined letter -- invisible in plain site."

Example #4: Wizards in a Laboratory

James Randi, Professional Skeptic

James Randi has been a bane to the spiritualists' society, homeopathic industry and paranormal claimants as a debunker. The James Randi Educational Foundation even has The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to "eligible applicants who can demonstrate a supernatural ability under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria," but nobody to date has lived up to the challenge. However, there's a two-part interview with James Randi and Michael Edwards on their YouTube account that shows if Randi, and his companions, had less scruples they could've fooled millions of people.

In the video Randi and Edwards are reminiscing about Project Alpha that hoodwinked an entire group of para-psychologists into believing that a couple of kids possessed psychic powers. It was an elaborate hoax to show how easy it was to even fool "scientists" who were willing to believe instead of investigate and one of their tricks was creating a psychic storm in a sealed laboratory. You can watch the videos here and here (the locked room story can be found in part 2).

Example #5: The Mind Reader

This one is a personal favorite of mine and also involves James Randi when he debunked James Hydrick, who looks like the illegitimate child of He-Man and Morticia Addams in his confrontation with Randi, and his extraordinary claims of having "unlocked" the powers of his mind – even giving a demonstration in the studio by flicking through the pages of a telephone book with his mind! I admit it, I was impressed the first time I watched that video, but only because I recognized it as a good and unusual magic trick. Watch the magician who explains miracles in action for yourself.

Example #6: Where Have You Gone, Professor Van Dusen?

Back in 2007 (I think), the NYPD released a video that showed a white car pulling off drunken maneuvers, seemingly impossible bursts of speed that ended with the phantom car phasing through an chain-link fence without smashing it. The accepted concensence appears to be that only the top of the fence was secured, basically working as a garage door, snapping back into place when the car had passed through. It's definitely a problem that would've piqued the interest of Professor S.F.X. van Dusen, a.k.a. The Thinking Machine, who solved a similar puzzle in "The Phantom Motor."

Well, these are my White Queen’s half dozen of impossible things that nobody has probably ever imagined, let alone before breakfast, but nonetheless happened outside the confines of a detective story – some of them of a very domestic nature. The locked room may be one of the most timeworn tropes of the genre, making its first debut in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," but that's because it has always been the most popular ride in the park and for good reason! If done well, it adds an extra layer of mystification to the plot, and more often than not, an impossible situation (like a theft of disappearance) can carry an entire story without a single body hitting the floor. 

Hopefully, I have demonstrated with this post that aren't just figments of imagination that belong on the pages of a Victorian mystery, but actually occur in the real world. McGown's eyewitness account shows that they sometimes just happen. I see opportunities instead of a tired old cliché.

The Babel-Fish Puzzle

"The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."

- Douglas Adams (The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, 1988)

In a recent post annotating the second anniversary of this blog, I alluded to a "germ of an idea" festering in my mind, and if it had worked, I would've had an impossible situation for you armchair detectives to unravel – unfortunately, it proved itself to be untenable. 

Janwillem van de Wetering

The Pledge:

If it had worked, the following would have transpired: a guest review from one of my fellow bloggers/mystery enthusiasts would've appeared discussing Janwillem van de Wetering's Een Oosterse huivering (An Eastern Shiver, 1980). It's a compendium of short stories in the vein of Edogawa Rampo's Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1956), but offering a wider selection of goods from all over Asia. The guest reviewer would've briefly touched upon all the stories, capsule reviews of sorts, as well as providing critical commentary on Van de Wetering as an anthologist – remarking how disappointing the reviewer was that he included stories by himself and Robert van Gulik but not one of Judge Ooka's cases by Bertus Aafjes.

The Turn:

There is, however, something curious and faintly miraculous about this review: the anthology has only appeared in Dutch and the reviewer I would've picked does not speak that language! But before I pull a "Masked Illusionist," and reveal how this trick can be done, I'd like to point out that I have already furnished you with several clues. Oh, and shame on you, if you're the first answer that popped into your head was that I had "ghostwritten" the review or translated the stories. That would be cheating!

The Prestige:

So how can I make a person understand a language he does not understand for just this one book? The answer is as simple as it’s obvious and as Nathan Ford remarked on his own methods, "I just pretty it up a bit, add this and that," and how well it would've worked depended on the presentation – and the willingness of the sleuth hounds that roam this blog not to run straight for google.

The biggest stumbling block in actually putting this up was the obviousness of it all, once part(s) of the solution clicks in place. And from there on, you can fill in the blanks.

An Eastern Shiver

Let's consider the clues given in the summation above: it's a collection of stories from all over the Asian continent (e.g. Japan, China, India, etc.) and the absence of Bertus Aafjes. The first should’ve clued you in that they probably weren't original translations by Van de Wetering (who was also known as English/Dutch translator) and the second that, if this anthology had contained a Judge Ooka story, it would've been categorically impossible for anyone who doesn't understand Dutch to have read the book – because they've never been translated into English. Van de Wetering culled these stories from pages of such collections as Ellery Queen's Japanese Golden Dozen (1978), Stories from a Ming Collection (1958) and Seven Japanese Tales (1963) and pieced them together as An Eastern Shiver. Never translated before or again... together... in Dutch. Hence my insistency on mentioning Aafjes, a distortion in the illusion that alludes to the truth, and the post-title.

But this would have put a lot of work on the plate of my co-conspirator, who would've had to collect, read and review all the separate stories and that's just asking too much for something that can be solved in matter of minutes or even seconds. There was also the problem that one of the stories, a standalone by Van de Wetering, appears to be untranslated and that would've meant cheating on one of 'em – and that just isn't the sporting thing to do.

Well, that was my idea for a "one-of-a-kind impossible situation" with the blogosphere and a creepy black-and-white picture of a dead mystery writer as a backdrop fizzling out into an off-hand dénouement, but I hope, at least, you found the idea of my Babel-Fish puzzle interesting or were amused by it. 

Time Served: Two Years in the Blogosphere

"Lots of things take time..."

- Michael Ende

Celebrating with John Dickson Carr & Co.

On February 19, 2011, I posted a compact review of Pat McGerr's Pick Your Victim (1946), which was the first of many posts dripping into an ever-widening stain on the crime-orientated section of the blogosphere – discussing everything from locked room mysteries to foreign detective series. OK. Granted, not everything, but considering how classical my tastes are, I think I touched upon a wide variety of mysteries over the past twenty-four months. It's progress... for me.

Anyway, I have nothing special lined up to mark this occasion, but I have a germ of an idea for a one-of-a-kind "impossible situation" that, if it works, will play out right here on this blog. I first need to check up on something and lay the groundwork, but even if it turns out to be impossible to pull off, I will let you all know what the plan was – including the solution.

So for now, I want to thank everyone who has been following this blog, new and old, and I hope you'll all be on my tail for this third year of endless babbeling on detective stories.

From the Crime-Does-Pay Files

Over the course of the past several days, Beneath the Stains of Time was picked by two fellow bloggers as one of the best mystery/crime blogs of 2012 and I want to thank them for keeping this niche on the digital crime circuit in mind when they gave out the awards. Sergio from Tipping My Fedora, which turned two this month, and Pierce from The Rap Sheet honored me with the title and was somewhat surprised by the latter – ‘cause the content of our blogs run in completely different directions. But I definitely appreciate it!

Now it's up to me, in turn, to name the next recipients and I have decided to not go for the usual suspects that already procured several nominations.

The List (in no particular order):

• Ho-Ling: The Case Files of Ho-Ling
• Patrick: At the Scene of the Crime
• Mousoukyoku: On the Threshold of Choas
• Steve: Mystery*FileLes Blatt: Classic Mysteries
• Arun Kumar: The Ingenious Game of Murder

And the obligatory rules: 

1 Select the blogs you think deserve the ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award

2 Write a blog post and tell us about the blogs you have chosen – there’s no minimum or maximum number of blogs required – and ‘present’ them with their award.

3 Please include a link back to this page ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award at The Thought Palette. and include these ‘rules’ in your post

4 Let the blogs you have chosen know that you have given them this award and share the ‘rules’ with them

5 You can now also join the Facebook group – click ‘like’ on this page ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award Facebook group and then you can share your blog with an even wider audience

6 As a winner of the award – please add a link back to the blog that presented you with the award – and then proudly display the award on your blog and sidebar

A regular review will be up ASAP.